Book One of Another "I Won't Read Book Two" Trilogy -- The Park Service

The Park Service - Ryan Winfield

Aubrey van Houten’s is your average post-apocalyptic world, one in which the last surviving humans live in a manmade cavern several kilometers below the surface. Space and resources are limited, so their society has made “adjustments.” The citizens come of age at fifteen, at which time an algorithm assigns them their careers based on a day-long test. But wait: they get to retire at thirty-five! Except that retirement means they’re sent to Eden… apparently some sort of “cloud storage” of their minds. All that and algae crisps at every meal…

With his father just weeks from retirement, Aubrey turns fifteen and receives his (yes, Aubrey’s a boy) assignment; the first person in memory sent up to level I. But on the way to his assignment, the maglev train crashes and Aubrey finds himself both miraculously alive and on the park-like surface of the world he’d always been told was a radioactive ruin. Lie #1… And there are other humans on the surface, too – but they live in hiding, in constant fear of “the Park Service.” As Aubrey learns when a Park Service drone murders an entire community, they’ve been hiding for good reason. But Aubrey will come to find that everything he learned as a child comprises lies #2 through about #1,000,000 – and the hits just keep on coming.

The first book of The Park Service trilogy, cunningly titled The Park Service (by Ryan Winfield) has over 700 five-star reviews on Amazon.com; but then, reality TV shows are wildly popular and people gobble greasy chicken at KFC every day. In other words, “popular” does not necessarily equal “good.” In the case of The Park Service, it most certainly does not.

The novel’s told in an annoying first-person style by a kid who – even though his family has lived in a cave more than a mile underground for 900 years – can readily identify grizzly bears, salmon, redwoods, and golden eagles – and knows who James Dean was. Really? Most modern kids couldn’t identify any bear except Teddy Ruxpin, and have no idea who the pride of Fairmount, Indiana was. Give me a break.

The writing style is that of a diary: with few exceptions, every sentence details the actions Aubrey undertakes or observes. No back-story, no background, no nothing: “I came. I ate. I saw. Jimmy and I walked.” Worse, much of the action is as derivative as hell – for instance, the testing-day concept is lifted whole from a 1957 Isaac Asimov short story (“Profession”); and as Aubrey and Jimmy struggled through the snow on the mountains, I half expected Gandalf to appear and wave his staff at a balrog. Even the pet kit fox could easily be Ged’s little otak from the pages of Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. Sheesh.

The Park Service is typical of modern self-published works (all  books published by "Birch Paper Press" are by this author) and other novels from insty-print publishers: a good editor would have trimmed it by 30-50% and, with luck, made the kid sound less like a 40-year-old. Or not – a good editor probably would have left it on the company slush pile.